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Joni Salminen Posts

A Little Guide to AdWords Optimization

A Little Guide to AdWords Optimization

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

Hello, my young padawan! This time I will write a fairly concise post about optimizing Google AdWords campaigns. As usual, my students gave the inspiration to this post. They’re currently participating in Google Online Marketing Challenge, and — from the mouths of children you hear the truth 🙂 — asked a very simple question: “What do we do when the campaigns…

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Using Napoleon’s 19th Century Principles for Email Writing

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

“In this age, in past ages, in any age… Napoleon.” (The Duke of Wellington) This is a short post reflecting upon Napoleon’s writing on war and efficient management. I think many of his principles are universal and apply to communication — my special consideration here is writing of emails, which is a vital skill because 1) you want your message to…

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Example of Google’s Moral Hazard: Pooling in Ad Auctions

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Google has an incentive to group advertisers in ad auction even when this conflicts with the goals of an individual advertiser. For example, you’d like to bid on ‘term x‘ and would not like be included in auctions ‘term x+n‘ due to e.g. lower relevance, your ad might still participate in the auction. This relates to two features: use of…

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Modern Market Research Methods: A Startup Perspective

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

EDIT: Updated by adding competitive analysis, very important to benchmark competitors. EDIT2: Updated by adding experimentation (14th April, 2016) Introduction Somebody on Quora was asking about ‘tools’ for validating viability and demand for a startup’s products. I replied it’s not a question of tools, but plain old market research (which seems to be all too often ignored by startup founders).…

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Dynamic Pricing and Incomplete People Information

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

One of the main problems in analytics is the lack of people information (e.g., demographics, interests). It is controlled by superplatforms like Google and Facebook, but as soon as you have transition from the channel to the website, you lose this information. So, I was thinking this in context of dynamic pricing. There’s no problem for determining an average solution,…

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Viisi mainostoimistojen virhettä digitaalisessa markkinoinnissa

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Niin sanotut perinteiset markkinoijat tekevät kokemukseni perusteella useita perustavanlaatuisia virheitä siirtyessään vanhoista ajattelumalleista digitaaliseen markkinointiin. Nämä virheet näkyvät etenkin monien mainostoimistojen kohdalla. Viisi virhettä ovat: 1. Tuloksia ei mitata Nähdään ettei mittaaminen ole mahdollista tai järkevää esim. “brändäykseen” keskittyvien offline-kampanjoiden kohdalla. Ajatus on virheellinen, koska a) myös offline-kampanjoita voidaan mitata (esim. kuponkeja käyttämällä) ja b) myös brändäyksen pitää tuottaa mitattavissa olevaa…

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A Quick Note on Bidding Theory of Online Ad Auctions

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Introduction This is a simple post about some commonly known features of online ad auctions. Generalized second-price auction (GSP) is a mechanism in which the advertiser pays a marginally higher bid than the advertiser losing to him. It encourages the bidder to place a truthful bid, i.e. one where the price level is such that marginal returns equal marginal cost.…

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